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A Summer Stuck at Gas Mart

Jeff Brandt10/9/06RHET 243 Paper #1

A Summer Stuck at Gas Mart

I close the
cash register drawer, take a breath, and look up. A middle-aged man with a
two-day stubble, wearing a dirty T-shirt and oily jeans, sets a drink and some beef
jerky down on my counter. He smells like eight hours of hard work.

“Anything else I can get for ya?” I
ask.

“Nope.
That’ll do ’er,” he says.

“Good
deal,” I say, not looking at the man or really thinking about what I’m saying
because I’m pressing the buttons for a 32-ounce Pepsi and a bag of Pemmican
Premium Cut: FOUNTAIN SODA, 5, 699
GROCERY.

Apparently
he needs a higher prescription for his bifocals, because he’s squinting at the
price display screen and still asks me, “How much do I owe ya?”

“That’ll be
$7.90, sir.”

“Alll-righty.”

He grunts and reaches into his back
pocket, pulling out a bank envelope full of crisp green bills. He licks his
index finger. His tan, chapped digits pinch the stack of dollars and extract
them. He flips through them and squints, a sliver of his tongue jutting out the
side of his mouth. Friday must be his
payday, I think to myself, and I watch him leaf through a couple hundreds
and several fifties and twenties before reaching the appropriate denomination:
a creaseless piece of legal tender commemorating everyone’s favorite Federalist
himself, Alexander Hamilton.

“Out of a 10 dollar bill?” I ask.
Obviously it’s out of ten dollars, but I ask anyway. Ol’ Trucker Hat nods.

10
00 CASH. DINGGGG— rattlerattlerattlerattle SMACK. The drawer jerks open.
Simultaneously, the printer buzzes, recording the transaction on a long roll of
paper that I will eventually cut, tape, sign, date, and stash in my bag for
Carla the manager to peruse at her pleasure the following morning. The screen
tells me to give the man 2.10,
and I oblige.

“Annnd,” I say, looking back up,
“two-ten’s your change.” I pause for a brief moment, a moment for which I have
paused thousands of times, and for which I will pause thousands of times more.
It’s an amount of time I learned, memorized, and now allot from muscle-memory.
And after that pause, I say, “Have a nice night.”

“Have a good’un,” he replies. He
turns and leaves the store.

The next guy’s a lot younger. He
walks toward me from the fountain drink area with confidence, clopping his light
brown work boots on the dusty tile floor. He sets his Styrofoam cup down and,
without hesitation, hands me a hundred dollar bill. I glance down at the piece
of paper, then back up at the customer. Yep,
it’s payday, alright. Why do I always get stuck working Fridays? We make
silent eye contact for a moment that feels exponentially longer than it
actually is— him peering at me from under his yellow, green, and brown
camouflage cap into my deep-set blue eyes; me studying his unblinking brown
eyes, trying not to frown.

“Sure you don’t have any smaller
amounts? I won’t have much in my drawer to work with if I give you change for a
hundred.”

He says nothing for a moment. Only
chews his gum and stares at me.

“Nope. This here’s all I got.”

Bastard!
I yell in my mind. And then I remember how my coworker Jack always says,
“People always come in here thinking this is a bank.”

“Alright, but just this once,” I
say, knowing full well that if the same guy comes in next Friday and repeats
this offense, I would still let him get away with it. After all, there’s no
point in letting a perfectly good soda go to waste. I’d just have to throw it
away if he didn’t pay for it.

Such is the nature of a Friday
night spent working at Dickerson Petroleum’s Phillips 66 Gas Mart 7 in Cottage
Hills, Illinois.

***

I come from a town of about 30,000
people in Southern Illinois called Alton.
It’s a Metro East suburb of St. Louis
with a slightly urban personality and a notable history. Alton is home to the tallest man who ever
lived, the first martyr in the abolitionist movement, the man who shot Martin
Luther King, Jr., the punter for the Tennessee Titans, and the Piasa Bird from
Illini Indian mythology. There’s a circular intersection in the middle of Alton where the capitol building would have been
constructed had Springfield not become the
capital of Illinois—
now we just call it “The Circle.” According to Troy Taylor’s Haunted Alton, my town is the most
haunted in America.

Contrary to Chicagoans’ popular
belief about Southern Illinoisans, in Alton, we’re generally not rednecks with
Southern accents that sport the Confederate flag on T-shirts and car decals,
although there are a few of us who do. We’re about 25/75 black and white, and
for the most part the races live harmoniously in A-Town, although there are
some who will never let go of the virus that is racism. We’ve got a fair mix of
white collar and blue collar workers and a fair mix of regular neighborhoods,
new subdivisions, old subdivisions, great mansions, apartments, and project
housing developments. We’ve got a crappy mall that’s well into the process of losing
all its businesses, a ton of fast food restaurants, a few grocery stores, some stuffy
antique shops, a couple coffee shops, and way too many new dollar stores.

In a matter of less than five
miles, the lifestyle changes completely. With a population of 4000, Cottage
Hills contrasts sharply from Alton’s
progressive attitude about constantly adding or subtracting businesses,
building a new high school, and renovating old roads and buildings to make them
look better. Instead of embracing an impending future, Cottage Hills seems to
be stuck in its old ways. There’s never talk about exciting new businesses
popping up around town. For most young Gas Mart customers, college is not an
option. Kids grab whatever work they can find after high school and do what
they can to survive. When sporting a mullet is not unusual in a town, it’s a
pretty clear sign that the place has yet to fully enter the 21st
century.

In short, Cottage Hills fits the
Chicagoans’ Southern Illinois stereotypes
pretty well. Mild Southern accents: check! Trailer parks: check! Beaten-up
muddy pickup trucks: check! Believe me when I say that I wasn’t exactly dying
to work at Gas Mart, but I took the only option with which I was presented.

I had submitted over 50 job
applications to the full gamut of available businesses: city works departments,
bookstores, video rentals, movie theaters, CD shops, hotels, grocery stores,
toy stores, restaurants, coffee shops, and dollar stores, as well as gas
stations. I completed hour-long personality tests for Target, Blockbuster,
Walgreen’s, and a St. Louis-area grocery store chain called Shop ’N Save. Apparently,
answering a few basic questions is not enough. Earning the right to work at
these fine establishments requires a test of endurance: one must yearn for a
position with at least enough fervor to not fall asleep at the computer in
between pages of mind-numbing inquiries. For God’s sake, I even suffered
through a fifth-grade level math test in a desperate attempt to become a Pizza
Hut Customer Maniac. Nothing worked.

It took almost two weeks to receive
the first phone call from an interested employer, which was too long, because as
a poor college student, I needed work and money, and I needed them all summer
long. Carla had left a message on my cellphone voicemail requesting that I come
in for a job interview. Before that call, I had fretted for days that no one
would contact me, and that I would end up spending my summer twiddling my
thumbs, stuck in my living room watching the Gameshow Network. I’d have no
money to do much else. Having any sign of hope was a relief unparalleled by any
trip to the bathroom I've ever taken. Yet, as I would soon find out, working at
Gas Mart would not be easy. It’s an experience that I now recall with mixed
emotions.

***

There were a lot of shortages at
Gas Mart. We were short on the money needed to repair the ratty old roof. We
were short on 75-cent bathroom condoms. We were short on tall brown paper bags
customers needed to carry home their 24-ounce cans of Keystone Ice and their
40-ounce bottles of Milwaukee’s
Best. After the Fourth of July, we were short on ice, since all the residents
of Cottage Hills needed three 8-pound bags for their coolers stocked with Bud
Lights. On Friday nights, I was short on $20 bills since I had to break fifties
and hundreds left and right. Short on food stamp receipt paper. Short on time,
short on patience, short on temper.

The one thing that Gas Mart never even
came close to being short of was character. There was enough personality in the
Gas Mart staff for a sitcom, a soap opera, a drama, a cartoon, and a reality
show. Between Carla, Jack, Mary, James, Charles, Patty, Anne, and I, we covered
the entire range of human emotion— from chipper to downtrodden, from fresh
disappointment to jaded antipathy, from lightheartedness to cynicism. During
each shift, employees would shift from suffering utter boredom due to lack of
business to exhibiting high-strung irritability from hours of nonstop customers.

Charles, James, Mary, and I worked
mostly nights. Every once in awhile there might be a change in lineup, and one
of us would work a morning shift. But in all likelihood, when people came into
Gas Mart after the sun dipped below the horizon, they’d see at least one of us
up at the counter, stuck in the exact place from which we wanted to escape.
They might have seen me staring at my watch in disbelief in between refilling
cigarette shelves with Marlboro Red hard packs. Disbelief that I’d only arrived
to work an hour before and that I’d be stuck at Gas Mart for six hours more.
They might have spotted Charles leaning idly on the counter; might have smelled
the sandwich he carried on the long walk to work and warmed in the microwave.
Might have walked in on James bitching about his son’s mother to his friend, a
stout, curly-haired blonde in his early twenties fresh from his day shift at
Steak ’n Shake. Might have caught Mary in the act of gesturing to no one in
particular, complaining about either not receiving enough hours, or working
those hours at the wrong time.

Charles started work at Gas Mart
the same week as I did. “Chuck,” as Jack called him, must have been in his late
forties or early fifties, since he’d developed a bald spot on the top of his
head— an island of white flesh surrounded by short, graying hair. He’d recently
moved back to Southern Illinois after the government revoked his driver’s
license for drunk driving in New
Hampshire. As a result, he walked to work every
night, often arriving a full half hour early for his 10 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. shift.
He’d fix his nightly pot of coffee, buy scratchers tickets, and tease Mary by expressing
his doubts about her ability to count the money in their drawers. After all, he’d
say, she was a woman. Then he’d head
out for a smoke and clock in five minutes late. Charles had a
girlfriend-turned-stalker that, toward the end of summer, held up the line in
order to berate him for not spending enough time with her. I felt bad for him
because he seemed to be stuck in this situation. The woman repeated this
behavior several times, and he never seemed to have any ideas for how to end
it. Due probably to his frustration, Charles called the woman “The Stalkerazzi,”
a term he could not define when I asked what it meant.

“Well, isn’t it pretty obvious?
She’s a stalker.”

“What about the ‘azzi’ part?”

“I dunno. James made it up.”

James interested me because, as a
Caucasian male born only a year before me, he represented what I could have been
had I grown up a stuck in a sleepy village a mere three miles directly east of
my home in Alton. I could have been that dude with the too-baggy, too-holey
washed-out jeans, sporting a pony tail and scruffy goatee, who listens to a
little too much 80’s hair metal. James swore by Marlboro cigarettes and White
Owl cigarillos. He, unlike all the other employees besides me, actually
traveled out of Illinois
on occasion. Except he only crossed the Mississippi River from Alton to West
Alton, Missouri in order to buy his smokes at Dirt Cheap Cigarettes, Beer &
Liquor, a trip that would probably only take him twenty minutes each way from
Gas Mart— if he followed the speed limit. James worked the late night shift so
he could see his infant son during the day. They’d been spending more time
together ever since the custody battle had shifted in his favor. James claimed it
was thanks to the lawyer he hired for $2000. “I know I’m paying him too much,”
he said. “But it’s worth every penny.”

If no women were around, both
Charles and James used two terms interchangeably to refer to opposite sex:
bitches and pussy. I kept my distaste for these expressions unsaid for fear of
alienation. They concurred that women were not for dating or marrying. With
Charles long-divorced and James in the process of ridding himself of his former
girlfriend, they’d already been through that mess and figured it wasn’t worth
the trouble. The use of women for sexual gratification, however, was still a
viable option. They made the ogling of attractive girls into a sport.

As soon as the double doors would
shut behind a curvaceous brunette, James would bellow, “Did you see the ass on that one? God DAMN!” He’d hold
his hands out in front of him, grabbing the girl’s imaginary hips and thrusting
his pelvis. “I would ride that all
night long!” Charles reacted only
slightly more subtly in similar situations. I can’t count the times I watched
his eyes nearly pop out when teenagers in short denim skirts entered the store.
After the girl invariably half his age disappeared from sight, he would turn to
me and nod his head, baring a devilish grin. I couldn’t help but laugh at the
greedy lust in his eyes.

The men of Gas Mart were not alone
in their quirkiness. The women matched their male counterparts in peculiarity.
Take, for example, Mary’s interesting habit of talking to herself. When
business slowed down, she’d tell me in her mouth-full-of-marbles voice that she
would go stock the cooler while I’d be stuck up front taking customers. And off
the middle-aged bespectacled woman would go, trotting with her long, skinny
legs, scratching her head under her long brown hair. When the store emptied, I
could faintly hear her deep mumbles from across the building. Was Jack back
there and I just didn’t know it? Was she talking to her husband or son on Gas
Mart’s cordless phone? I peeped down the hallway from the storefront to the
open cooler only to see Mary with her arms akimbo, her veiny fingers twisted
around the belt loops of her 80’s-style high-riding jeans. She stood there and
thought out loud, cursing Carla’s clumsy arrangement of beer in the cooler.
Mary would move a few cases, then pause and curse out loud, then move a few
cases, then pause and curse out loud some more.

One night when Mary and I stood outside
enjoying a soothing, gentle zephyr, we spotted Charles ambling toward Gas Mart.
I leaned back on the building’s window ledge and thought about where I’d rather
be as she talked about random things and smoked. Eventually, we could see
Charles’ lips moving and both of his hands freely gesturing as if he were
making conversation with a friend. Yet his line of vision was directed at the
ground a few feet in front of him. The wind carried his voice to us.

“Is Charles out there talking to
himself?” Mary asked. “It looks like he’s talking to himself.”

Needless to say, Mary’s observation
perplexed me. I considered pointing out the irony of her statement, but by the
time I parted my lips to speak, Charles emerged from the darkness of the long
parking lot Gas Mart shares with a bar-and-grill, and we could see he was
speaking into a hands-free cellphone headset clipped to his ear.

Charles finished his call and
greeted us.

“Oh hi, Charles. We thought you
were talking to yourself.” Mary laughed, and I cracked a smile, but for
different reasons.

If there were certain people who
worked mostly nights, it only follows that others worked mostly days. As a
whole, they did not interest me nearly as much as the night crew, so I was disheartened
the few times I looked at the schedule and saw an a.m. and not a p.m. time
under my name. The day workers included Carla, Patty, and Anne. Carla was short-and-stout
with an ever-growing rear end, and she was usually bright and cheery. She listened
to country radio station morning talk shows as she rang up truckers’ daily
diesel fill-up and the neighborhood regulars’ coffees and newspapers. According
to Patty, Carla loves to sing a rendition of “When Stars go Blue” by Tim McGraw
that could make a hound dog’s baying sound as glorious as Luciano Pavarotti in
comparison to Carla’s shrill, dissonant singing voice. I never witnessed it
myself, which was fine by me since I despised country music. That was another
reason I preferred to work nights— less chance of listening to Billy Joe’s love
song to Bobbie Sue. Overall, I liked Carla. I almost always felt comfortable
around her, because she never spoke to me harshly. She graciously accepted my
apology each time I messed up on the job, which was often. Carla was definitely
more forgiving than most of my coworkers. She also seemed to be the most
ambitious of the full-time employees. After only two years with the company,
she’d moved up to a position of management. She did not seem to be stuck in one
place as did everyone else.

. When I asked Patty how to perform
any task, she would shoot a bewildered glance at me like I had a booger on my
face, then demonstrate by doing the task instead of just telling me how. I
often wondered if Patty was trying to make me feel guilty for not just
magically knowing how to do everything. Patty, our most active worker who Jack
often deemed “one of these hyper people,” cleaned shelves and checked dates of
grocery items more than anyone else. She once told me that she mopped the floor
about five times in a normal day shift, which was about five times greater than
my average. Patty was about the same age as Mary, with dirty blonde hair and
wrinkly yellow-tan smoker’s skin, aged before its time because Patty was stuck
in with the same nicotine addiction as everyone at Gas Mart besides Carla and
me. She also loved NASCAR with a passion, hated Bush with a passion, and had an
unemployed husband that visited her twice a shift to buy fountain sodas and GPC
full flavors. I discovered that she wore dentures to work after seeing her
visit work to buy gasoline a few times. Her shpeech shounded a shmidge shloppy,
and I noticed that her lips curled under her gums where her dentures would
normally be while she was working.

The coworker with whom I enjoyed
working the least was Anne, although Patty was a close second. Anne was a
petite, freckled 26-year-old trailer park mother of two daughters and one son.
She didn’t look a day over 17, and she had a teenager-esque attitude problem to
match. Anne refused to stock the beer cooler, telling me I would have to go do
it myself because “It’s fuckin’ freezing in there.” There I was, stuck laboring
long, dull hours at a job that didn’t pay enough for how hard I worked, and to
top it off, Anne forced me to do chores for her because she might get a little
cold.

And then there was Jack. He bridged
the gap between the night and day regulars, working days every other weekend
and weeknights usually on the 2-10:30 p.m. shift. As assistant manager and Gas
Mart employee for 18 years, he served as the fuel that kept the place running
and the glue united us all. If one of us underlings had a complaint about
Carla, he or she would inform Jack, and he would most likely concur and later
give subtle suggestions to Carla. If Carla had something to tell the night
crew, she would use Jack as her messenger. Plus, Jack was Gas Mart’s big draw.
Everybody and his grandma stormed in demanding to know if Jack was working.
After all, a whole generation of Cottage Hillians had grown up with Jack
selling them sodas and candy bars. It is my firm belief that without Jack,
there would be no Gas Mart. Perhaps the business would still exist, but it
would not have the same personality. I think Jack realized that too, and the
knowledge trapped him into being stuck in Cottage Hills for the rest of his
working life.

Jack was a portly career smoker
pushing 60, with a rusty hair color that mixed brown and gold and had hints of
graying patches. He looked a little bit like a walrus with his puffy eyelids
and his sagging, leathery flesh. He had long claws for fingernails stained
approximately the same sickly coffee stain yellowish-brown as his mustache. His
hot breath reeked of rancid milk.

But Jack was a riot, and he knew it.
He’d perform chores in his natural bowlegged gait humming Golden Oldies and
classical music. His proud potbelly opened up a space at the bottom of his
shirt. Sometimes the hanging material would flutter in the box fan-produced
wind. He would fabricate denominations of money, just to prove to everybody
that he was a clever guy: “And a four-dollar bill’s your change.” He’d hand the
customer four singles, tell them to have a nice day, and ask the next customer
in faux-grumpiness “Oh, what do YOU
want?” It was always a show with Jack, always something out of a mid-20th
century comedy hour. In the same minute, he would wiggle his eyebrows at a blushing
blonde, whine about having to help the next customer, ask him if he was
absolutely sure he wanted that pack of cigarettes, and glance at the person and
ask, while feigning sincere innocence, “I can keep the change, right?” Then his
face would light up, a sly grin rising to the surface.

At first, I couldn’t understand why
no one had promoted him to full manager yet. I mean, the man’s worked there
almost as long as I’ve been alive. So one day in June, I asked Patty.

“Naw, they’d never promote ’im.
You’ll understand once you work with him more. He doesn’t really do that much.”

Thus was
the public conception of Jack. If a man asked what Jack was up to and I told
them that he was in the back, the man would chuckle and say something like
“Have you actually checked to make sure he’s working back there?” Sometimes
people extended their sympathy to me; at least one person for every shift would
ask me if Jack was making me do everything. I, however, never really thought
that to be the case. It’s true that Jack took smoke breaks too often and spent
a lot of time yakking it up with all the regular customers. Sometimes his
absent-mindedness got the best of him, and he’d forget to either clock in or
clock out. Patty even claimed that Jack completed paperwork too slowly,
although I’m not sure how she knew about that, since she never worked in the
office. But when it came down to it, he finished everything that needed to be
done, whether or not it meant sticking around an extra half hour after his
scheduled clock-out time.

On one
occasion, Carla confronted Jack about staying clocked in for an extra 30
minutes on one day of the week before. She asked if he’d spent the extra time
actually working or if he’d forgotten to clock out. He replied to her saying
that he hadn’t done any work. But later, he told me candidly:

“She always
asks me if I was working, and I always say no. But it ain’t the truth.”

Here was a
man who felt responsible for the wellbeing of his store, but he never asked
anyone for credit. He was stuck at this gas station because he knew it needed
him, even if Gas Mart didn’t know it.

***

I’m pretty sure they all made fun of me behind
my back at some point or another. I could sense it when Mary said to Charles
one night: “Jack said everyone all weekend came out with the right amount in
their drawer. Well, except for one
person.” She paused for a moment, then added, “And guess who that was,” after which she looked right
at me.

They probably thought of me as the college student
dandy, working just for a summer and then gone until the holidays because I
thought I was better than them. They probably wondered why, if I was supposed
to be so smart, I did not often end a shift with an even drawer. Why, they must
have asked each other, did I press Check
sometimes when customers paid in cash? Why did I insert new receipt paper
upside-down? Why did I not shovel enough cubes in each ice bag?

Those were the questions they must
have wanted to ask me for which I have no valid answer. I gradually improved,
but I never reached the level of perfection of all the other employees. It was
strange feeling dumb in the presence of people with no education past high
school. People like James who will admit they conceived children out of wedlock
because they drank too much to remember to use adequate protection; people like
Jack who threw away hundreds of dollars every year buying the same lottery and
instant win tickets that they saw hundreds of people lose money on daily;
people who spent half of what they make in an hour each day on a smoking habit
that will someday kill them, when they could have saved their money (and their
lives) and moved out of their trailer park or sent their kids to community
college; people who don’t refer to soft drinks as “soda” like most St. Louisans
or “pop” like most Chicagoans, but “sodee.” And yet every day, I felt like a
naïve greenhorn among seasoned professionals, seeing their heads shake in scorn
at my careless errors. It’s true that I was probably more book-smart, but they
were undoubtedly more work-smart. I surprised myself every night with how many
mistakes I could make that I should have already learned to prevent. About once
a week, I’d discover a new and exciting mistake and quickly incorporate it as
part of my regular routine. It’s clear to me now that I was stuck in a
never-ending cycle of making stupid mistakes.

But then, everyone made fun of
everyone else behind their backs. I think it was just our way of getting
through the day without going insane. We weren’t allowed to beat the customers
senseless, so we had to take out our stress on each other.

And we were all, in a way, stuck. I
was stuck working at the only job that offered the hours I needed among people
with which I had little in common. Patty thought she’d be receiving a promotion
to become assistant manager for another Gas Mart forty minutes away in Belleville, but the other
store’s manager was none too fond of her, so she settled for third-in-command
in Cottage Hills. With Anne’s boyfriend out of the picture, Anne was stuck
raising her three children by herself from the age when she was almost a child
herself. Charles couldn’t legally drive a car, so he couldn’t drive off to
God-knows-where to resume causing mischief. James’ court date schedule had no
end in sight. After whiling away a third of his life and still never receiving
a promotion to manager, Jack would clearly never make enough money to move out
of the same home in which he grew up. Even if he could, he knew that Gas Mart
could not function without him.

Even the customers were stuck. Born
to continue their fathers’ waste collection, carpentry, construction, and auto
mechanic businesses. Born to mimic the abusive and submissive behaviors they
grew up witnessing their parents perform. Born to become dependant upon link
cards as they piss away grocery money on cigarettes, beer, and the big Tuesday
and Friday Mega Millions drawings. Even if on a one-in-a-billion chance one of
them did win it all, I bet not a damn thing would change.

My feelings about the coworkers and
the customers I dealt with for those three months, however, are more
complicated than just that. It is not as easy as feeling condescending toward
them, because I know they are stronger than I am. I’ll live my whole life never
knowing what it’s really like to be from the neighborhood surrounding Gas Mart.
I was stuck there only for a brief amount of time, so I can only speculate.

At the end of the summer, my
parents’ financial circumstances afforded me the privilege of returning to
college. The arrival of fall had unstuck me. I had the option to forget all
about those people, just as most middle class Americans do as soon as they
leave gas stations. A lot of educated people might look at Cottage Hills and
stick up their noses in arrogance, believing that those people’s lives aren’t
worth anything because they aren’t becoming doctors, lawyers, stock brokers,
and computer programmers.

But I didn’t forget about them, and
I don’t hold those beliefs, because I know a certain truth: these people
possess a kind of wisdom I will never attain— a knowledge that can only come
from being stuck one’s entire life. They know
that their lives will never change; they’re not college graduates, but they’re
not stupid. They’re stuck in their dreary, workaday Cottage Hills lives, and
they are utterly aware of it. Yet they still find the will within them to
persist.

A life of middle-class convenience
has weakened me to the point where if I ever faced the same adversities as the
residents of that hard-working little Southern Illinois
hicktown, I would buckle under the frustration. I wouldn’t find the will within
me to forge on as they do, making just enough to live paycheck-by-paycheck. I
wouldn’t be able to accept the fact that most members of society wouldn’t give
me a second thought or believe that I am an important part of our country.

Yet they keep chugging along, finding
a way to scrape by even though America
forgets they exist.